Single mothers became common before single. Childless and economically stable women who claim independence became a common feature.
Most of the women without children, bar fertility issues, chose not to raise their children out of wedlock. When the serious man decided to take a tangent behind her home, she conditioned herself to let motherhood go. This was well understood and Kenyan society somehow made peace with it.
There is a new monkey in town, but let us first get the bonobo out. This article is about single, straight men. On my trip upcountry recently, I found my mother discussing a recently departed villager.
Apparently those who went for his burial were back home by two in the afternoon. There was nothing much to be said of a man who chose not to marry or have children. This is deep in rural Kenya; the women my mother was talking to could not hide their surprise.
To add to that, he was not a member of any church. This went into making his funeral service short because the pastor’s brief was to lead the internment. I told the women to prepare themselves to bury many single, childless men who don’t know how the inside of a church looks like in the coming days.
In the past, women fought tooth and nail to stay in a marriage that made no sense, just to secure a burial site. It was a heavy burden to bury a lady in her home, whether she was married or not.
This meant that even sloppy men who could not hold down a lady had wives and children. Relatives also stepped in to cover for his gaps. But that is a dying phenomenon. It saved many men and guaranteed their genetic continuity because the lady stayed at her cost. Most of them raised children in what women today call single and married.
Women now have options, especially when they have their own money, however little. Families in Western Kenya are also open to burying their daughters in the home if confusion ensues around her marital status. If a man cannot pull his weight, the women will step out of the door even if it is just for her mental peace.
That is one side of the coin. The other side is that men have become sly foxes until they turn silver. Back in the day, even today, most men can never state authoritatively when they got married.
They had a girlfriend who visited often but the man felt too independent to be domesticated. Many men got married because a lady saw him confused and lost in his world and moved in slowly. She then got pregnant and the man could not send her away.
Men gave in to domestication for the social pressure, but also for the sake of the child. Men are slowly throwing these expectations out of the window. The advent of AirBnB has made things easy for men. They don’t have to take the ladies they don’t value to their houses. This means that the lady will not get a chance of marking territory.
Sex is a big factor for men. Nowhere in the history of Kenyan men has sex been this available. You don’t have to be tied down to marriage to enjoy the benefits of marriage.
A couple can have arrangement of a partnership that is marriage in definition but is neither socially binding or legal. When someone feels time is up, they just bail out and everyone understands.
Men are learning the hard way that the game was rigged long before we were born. We are just primed into taking care of a wife and children when all the power and benefits belong to women. We work to provide and protect them then die early and leave an inheritance for them to enjoy.
The YOLO (You Only Leave Once) legion is growing among men. Men now want to enjoy the sweat of their brow despite it being a Garden of Eden curse. Men want to leave like birds, feed, drink, have some random woman at his beck and call and sleep easy. Those with children are happy to send upkeep and pay school fees as the children live with their mothers, who are happy to have custody of the children.
The person who opened a food and bakery section in our supermarkets should be blamed for the comfortable life of single men. Single men can pass by supermarkets and get ready made warm “home” food on his way home. It comes packed in a container such that he doesn’t need to use his plates. No headaches of who will wash the dishes. Their bank accounts are now the wife of their youth.
They have also managed to find a narrative around the societal expectations. Back in the day if your peers felt you were taking the singlehood game too far, they would tell you to toa jam, meaning clear the way. “If you feel that I am delaying to get married, you can get married on my behalf.” Has become a common refrain online.
This is the reason why going forward more and more men will be going to the grave single and without children.